The Shakti
Her ‘Part’ in the Play
and
Revelation of Adi Da Samraj
———–
“The Goddess is always Incarnated as everything, as everyone, as the Cosmic Mandala. That is the Goddess.”
Your Heart Must Be Moved
“When I arrived at the shrine I bowed to Nityananda reverently and walked around his burial place three times. I sat down to meditate and felt him touch me. His image appeared before my internal vision. I told him about my experiences, and how the Shakti appeared to have taken me over… He blessed me, told me that I belonged to her now, and that I should leave and let her guide me.”
The Knee of Listening – Chapter 15
“Shakti is not my mother but my consort, my beloved in eternal generative embrace in which everything is lived but never born or dead”
unpublished notes – Adi Da Samraj – 1970
Shakti or The Feminine Principle in the world has a major play in the sadhana and Revelation of Adi Da Samraj. It is important to fully understand the play of energy and it’s relationship to Consciousness and what Adi Da’s teaching is all about. In fact it would be impossible to comprehend – fully – the teaching of Adi Da or any other spiritual teacher for that matter without fully understanding the feminine aspects of their teachings.
Adi Da has often said there are two aspects of his work with us. He lives as the prior and moveless Heart, prior Consciousness, the Self, and the Siddhi or Power of his formless, all-pervading Presence awakens the conscious life of understanding in those who come to him. At the same time he also lives as the God-Light, the perfectly and eternally reflected and creative Power of the Divine (Shakti). (The Garbage and The Goddess)
The following is a good starting place. What follows is a short piece from April 18, 1974 – an unpublished ‘Interview with Bubba’, also sometimes titled Franklin Jones is a Fictional Character. Terry Patten asks Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj) about his early life as Franklin Jones. The beginning of the interview or talk is available in a short audio file (Franklin Jones is a Fictional Character).
What then follows is an article written in the Free Daist Magazine (A Magazine for devotees) by Carolyn Lee a chief editor for Adidam (The Seed I Made at the Vedanta Temple Must Flower in the World). Her article gives a good background and overview of Adi Da’s play with the Divine Principle – Shakti – or the feminine principle of existence.
At the end of the article there are other links which are good sources of information on the Feminine Principle in Adi Da’s teachings and his Revelation.
Beezone
SRI DA AVABHASA: The Goddess is always Incarnated as everything, as everyone, as the Cosmic Mandala. That is the Goddess.
DEVOTEE: Forgive me for even daring to speak in such language, but You as the Divine Person have Incarnated uniquely in this time. The Goddess is, so to speak, eternally Incarnated—except that You have told us that the process of the Cosmic Mandala would come to an end. The Goddess has always been Incarnated, whereas You are uniquely Incarnated.
SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes. She is Incarnated, however, in the conditional sense of appearing. In My relationship to the Goddess, She is converted in Her disposition and set right in the context of the Divine. Therefore, because of this, an entirely different view of the Divine Energy is possible. The Goddess is not the Incarnating Force or the Appearing Being in all this suffering, illusion, and limitation. It is of great import that the Goddess is wed, submitted, to the Ultimate Divine, the Very Energy, the Inherent Radiance, the Self-Radiance of the Divine.
This is the right understanding of the Goddess. She no longer appears separately from that “Point of View”. She is part of the Inherent Oneness of the Divine. It is not “Me and the Goddess”. I Am Complete, as I have said. There is no “difference”. I speak of the Goddess. You do not. Fundamentally there is no Goddess, then. There is only the Divine. The Divine Person Is One and Whole, not two, not many—One Person, One Absolute Being, Very Consciousness, Very Force, All Love-Bliss, Self-Existing, Self-Radiant, Absolute, not divided.
The only reason to talk about some kind of two-ness between the Divine as Very Being, or Consciousness Itself, and the Goddess, somehow Divine but Independent Energy Appearing as all manifestation—the only reason to speak in terms of that two-ness is the dualistic vision associated with egoity, conditionality, appearances. In that point of view it can seem that there are two. But if you understand rightly, there is only One. It is not “the God” and “the Goddess”—the Divine Person “and” the Goddess. There is just One. That was the Realization in the Vedanta Temple. That was the Accomplishment there. And that is what you must Realize also—not the Divine somehow over against you and all of the conditional cosmos, but just the Very One Who Is Inherently Beyond all “difference” and beyond separation.
ANOTHER DEVOTEE: Beloved, there has always only been That One.
SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes. But there have been many appearances and many thoughts
DEVOTEE: We have Your Incarnation here.
SRI DA AVABHASA: My Sign set all of it straight, actually Accomplished it, by virtue of Divine Siddhis. My Divine Self-Realization is not a bit of poetry. I am not merely using symbolic language, as if it was just the same before and the Vedanta Temple was just a bit of poetry. It is not that at all. It was an actual Event—not just the Event of My Divine Re-Awakening but the Event of the utter submission of the entire Cosmic Mandala to the Very Divine Condition by virtue of the Divine Siddhis snapping the barrier that the Cosmic Mandala has represented for beings until now.
Your Heart Must Be Moved – March 21, 1993
From Franklin Jones is a Fictional Character – Bubba Free John, 1974
“By birth in this world we are all children of the Goddess, we’re always seeking to maintain the security of our apparent birth, and to create a hedge around ourselves with experience and conditions so that we will not be penetrated, so that we will not suffer, the death that’s implied in our birth. So we go through life accumulating experiences, conditions, thoughts, memories, inclinations of all kinds. All of which act as a hedge, a force of security around ourselves and so we are all children of the Goddess without consciousness. All enclosed in the armor of the apparent creation which is this Cosmos.
But the spiritual process is another even entirely in which every individual is turned out of that principal of security, of survival. We are asked to perform a sacrifice in which we are always liberating ourselves from entanglement with the Goddess, from a false relationship with the Goddess, or to be manifesting power of the worlds. We are always asked to sacrifice it, not sacrifice it by ripping it away in some unconscious way, that is just self-torture, but by turning into the Divine, the ultimate Divine, Real God, The Heart.
We’re then able to sacrifice all the forms that have been accumulated and that are arising from hour to hour. We are then free from that whole destiny and relationship to the Goddess becomes an entirely different kind. Everyday then everything is fresh, everything every hour then, everything is fresh, we can participate in an ongoing world event without declining, without becoming solid, because that sacrifice is being performed in usmoment to moment.
So all beings then remain fresh for one who is awake, the world remains fresh. You know that the world in itself and beings in themselves are becoming more and more solid always more obsolete, always changing, always dying. Even so, it is all fresh, a living process for those who practice, because that one is involved in its fundamental principle which is sacrifice. Sacrifice into the Divine. Not merely throwing things away.
So every devotee is being asked to become involved in that principle sacrifice to become one with the Heart, rather than children of the Goddess. Then they become involved in the same relationship to the Goddess or the manifesting power of the worlds. They participate in the same relationship to that, the Ultimate Divine enjoys, which is a free one, which is pleasure in the Devi without accumulation, without securities, without a bottom, without a floor.
That fundamental floor, a bottom or support is the ego, the separate self-sense. When that is no longer the foundation of your conscious existence from hour to hour then you become capable of this sacrifice. The ego must be undermined, the principle of consciousness must return to the Heart or the intuition of Real God before this sacrificial life is possible.”
“The Seed I Made at the Vedanta Temple Must Flower in the World”
by Carolyn Lee –
The Free Daist (Magazine)
Vol 1, Number 6, September 1990 –
The Feast of Aham Da Asmi
“the Seed that I Made at the Vedanta Temple must Infiltrate the world and Raise up every one.”
HE – AND – SHE IS ME – I Am The Icon Of Unity
Secluded in a corner of downtown Hollywood, hugging the freeway, is an unexpected haven created by the Vedanta Society of southern California. At the top of a flight of red brick steps stands a white stuccoed temple dedicated to the nineteenth-century Indian saint Ramakrishna. Domed in oriental style and flanked by trees and a small garden, the whole complex has a modest, harmonious quality that brings relief from the ungainly sprawl of the surrounding streets and the roar of the freeway. The,temple is freely available to anyone who wishes to pause there for a time of quiet or meditation.
It was in this simple temple, on September 10, 1970, at approximately four o’clock in,the afternoon, that Da Kalki, then` “Franklin Jones”, Re-Awakened to His, Native Condition permanently, He wrote of this moment in His Spiritual autobiography, The Knee of Listening:
Suddenly, I became profoundly and directly aware of what I am’.. It was a tacit realization, a direct knowledge in consciousness itself. It was consciousness itself without the addition o f a communication from any other source. I simply sat there and knew what I am. I was being what I am. I am Reality, the Self and Nature and support of alt things and all beings. I am the one Being, known as God, Brahman, Atman, the One, Siva, the Self.
In September of this year at the Feast of Aham Da Asmi (“I Am Da”), Free Daists joyfully Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the “Vedanta Temple Event” – the Re Awakening of Da Kalki to the “Bright” Divine Condition in Which and as Which He consciously took Birth.
At the same time, we are commemorating another aspect of the Vedanta Temple Event, a Prelude inseparably related to it, which occurred, also in the Temple, on the previous day. In a Blissful, Invisible Embrace exceeding all metaphors of sexual union, Da Kalki Mastered the Mother Shakti (the Universal Energy and Source of all forms), Who submitted Herself to Him as His Eternal Consort and the Grace-Giving Power for His Teaching Work that was about to begin.
This two fold Event – the submission of the Shakti to Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda and His Perfect Realization of His own Prior State – took place not only in the domain of Consciousness but in human time. That is the point. As the years pass it is inevitable that more and more people will come to recognize the Vedanta Temple Event as a turning point in Cosmic history. Already, twenty years later, as Da Kalki is openly, Revealing the Scope of His-Liberating Work as The Divine World Teacher, we can more fully appreciate what the Vedanta Temple Event portended for all humanity. On the great occasion of this Anniversary, we humbly offer this tribute to our Beloved Sat-Guru, Da Love-Ananda Hridayam, in praise of His All-Sufficient Awakening Power
The Goddess in Her myriad forms is the Energy and Life-Force of the universe. This Force has been worshipped by human beings from beginningless time as the “Woman-Power” or “Mother-Power” of existence, the Creative Energy or “Shakti” (to use a common Sanskrit term) that births, sustains – and also destroys – all forms. The Goddess, therefore, has two sides. She is experienced in benign ways (as, for example, the preserver of fertility), and also in dangerous and terrible shapes, as when the Hindu Goddess Kali is represented as a ghastly murderess and devourer of her children, with blood dripping from her fanged teeth.
The Goddess also stands for the bewitching power of sexuality, as in the legend of the Lorelei maiden by the river Rhine, who lures hapless sailors to shipwreck and death with her singing.
In the Indian traditions, the Goddess Force is typically regarded as “maya”, the power of illusion that holds all beings in thrall to the pleasures of the (apparently) material world and prevents their Enlightenment. This negative view of the Goddess Power is the origin of religious strategies of asceticism – the refusal to associate with the Shakti for fear of being seduced and turned away from a higher “Spiritual” destiny.
The Tantric traditions, on the other hand, regard the Shakti in a more positive light, as a force that may be channeled for the work of Enlightenment when the aspirant has attained self-mastery. In the highest expression of Tantra, the Goddess assumes the role of Supreme Liberator from the very forces of illusion with which She is commonly identified.
But while the liberating function of the Goddess-Power has been traditionally acknowledged, the modern revival of interest in the Goddess generally fails to take into account that fundamentally the Goddess is energy, “maya” – a tide of experience and stimulation, that ebbs and flows but brings no lasting peace.
We are all by tendency slaves of the Goddess. Only in the circumstance of true Spiritual practice based on the conscious sacrifice of one’s whole being in God (rather than reactive self-suppression) is the Revelation Given of the highest Nature of the Shakti. Otherwise all of life, including esoteric religion, is one long indulgence in the “delights” of conditional existence, physical, mental, and mystical.
This is the message of the Sadhana of Da Kalki, or “Franklin Jones”, as He was then known. It was a Lesson lived out in our own time, addressing us as contemporary Westerners most directly, but also, miraculously, summarizing and transcending the entire “great search” of humanity. This story, then, of “Franklin’s” Play with the Shakti and its momentous outcome, is the most important story to which anyone who is looking for the key to higher human transformation and a “New Age” for mankind can turn.
When Da Kalki Speaks of the Goddess, He Speaks in the most profound paradoxes of One Whom He has found to be inseparable from the Very Divine, and Who is His own Nature. But He also Speaks of Her as a Living Personality far Greater than any of the culturally conditioned forms through which the Goddess has been represented traditionally. He has explained the meaning of the Shakti in His Life as follows:
The inherent Radiance of the Divine Being, the Condition in Which all apparent beings are arising – to call that Radiance the Goddess is just a way of particularizing It for the sake of “consideration”, To the ordinary Western point of view, it is acceptable to talk about some insight about one’s hand, but it is not acceptable to talk about seeing the inherent Radiance of the Divine manifested tangibly as a Woman Guiding one in one’s sadhana. Science would not discuss such things!
My relationship to this tangible Presence – tangible down to the last eyelash – was summarized in the Vedanta Temple and Divine Self-Realization. (March 16, 1988).
Energy Versus Consciousness: The “Problem” of “Franklin’s” Sadhana
The Life of Da Kalki is what in India is called a “Rahasya”, or sacred Mystery. It transcends anything we can ever say about it. His Life has been, as He Says, “an adventure and unfolding in the ‘Bright” – the Radiance and Bliss and Love of the God State that He also describes as the Divine Shakti. In this sense He was never “unEnlightened”, never an ordinary man, But in early childhood He submitted Himself to an apparent “forgetting” of His Inherent Nature for the sake of working out in a human body-mind the full process of Divine Self-Realization for others. There was no human forethought in this. It was a spontaneous movement of Compassion arising in a Divine Intention formed Prior to His Birth.
And so from the age of two to thirty years, Da Kalki, as “Franklin Jones”, passed through an immensely difficult human and Spiritual trial in which He suffered all the limits, doubts, and struggles of an ordinary human being. Nevertheless, below consciousness He was always being led by the “Bright”, responding to what He later called a “fierce, mysterious impulse” at the heart of His Being. Driven by this hidden Grace, Franklin submitted to the Unknown and lived His unique Ordeal (fully described in His autobiography, The Knee o f Listening) without any prior knowledge of what it was about or how it would turn out.
On the one hand He was engaged in a profound Play with the Shakti as Energy, while on the other He was absorbed in the deepest questions about Truth and Reality. And so there is an intriguing double strand, a play of opposites, shaping His entire Sadhana, And these opposites, which He calls at times by different names – Energy and Awareness, or the Shakti and Consciousness, or the “Light” and the “Heart” – were always intimately connected.
A Passionate Search and a Crisis in Consciousness
As a youth disillusioned with conventional religion and philosophy, Franklin threw Himself into the “maya” of low-life New York, convinced that if He submitted self to exhaustive experience God would eventually be Revealed. At the same time He was involved in an academic search at Columbia College, trying to discover through the works of the great Western thinkers what Consciousness is.
Illumination came after more than two years of living at an intense pitch of seeking. One night as He sat at His desk, feeling that He had exhausted the possibilities experience, Franklin was overtaken by crises in consciousness, He suddenly obsessed His whole search in summary form and saw it as an endless, fruitless drama of contradictions. And at the very moment that He surrendered to this intuition, a vast, ecstatic energy rose in His body and poured through Him in waves, forcing Him to flee His room and run through the city streets transported with joy.
This crisis was epoch making for Franklin. It was not a permanent Realization of Truth, but it left Him certain that Consciousness or Reality was unqualified, untouched by the vagaries of events, and that the Truth would stand out as Itself when all contradictions and conflicts were removed. He also saw that He lacked nothing, that Freedom and Happiness are already the Native State of a human being, and that the search for happiness is utterly unnecessary.
This breakthrough in understanding was obviously not arbitrary. A very remarkable play with the Shakti force had led up to it and coincided with it. In embracing the maelstrom of danger and pleasure offered in New York, Franklin was actually confronting the Goddess-Power in Her most destructive and deluding aspects – and proving His, future capacity to Master Her.
In terms of His sheer ability,to “eat” experience without being destroyed by it or deflected in His goal, and even to use the energy of it to quicken his Spiritual progress, Franklin did something quite unique. He had no tradition, no living Guru, no training for such a Sadhana nothing (of which He was aware) to guide and protect Him. His years running the gamut of experience in New York, and the profound crises of illumination and release that followed, are not explicable in ordinary human terms. He had begun by yielding Himself without prejudice to the chaos of life experience in order to find God, and had in return been Given an extraordinary bodily revelation of the advanced Samadhi He (now) calls “Cosmic Consciousness”, and even a momentary glimpse of Divine Self Realization. He had already intuited the Lesson of His entire Sadhana. As He Wrote in The Knee of Listening:
I knew that my own path of life and the meaning of all life was in this process of Siva-Shakti, the endless unfolding and return of consciousness, energy, and experience, and its consistent foundation in the pure infinity of unqualified, transcendent being. (The Knee of Listening)
A Yogic Relationship to the Shakti
When Franklin met His American Teacher, Rudi (Swami Rudrananda), in New York in 1964, He entered into a crucial new phase in His Play with the Shakti. Although He had had kundalini experiences since childhood (and dramatically so in the event in college referred to previously), it was only after becoming a student of Rudi that Franklin began to practice the conscious reception and “conductivity” of this esoteric current of bodily energy. With Rudi He began to relate to the Goddess Power as a tangible force that stood outside Him and that He felt emanating from His Teacher.
This marked the beginning of Franklin’s Yogic relationship to the Shakti, a process that continued to deepen after He left Rudi and made His way to the Ashram of Swami Muktananda (one of Rudi’s Indian Teachers) in 1968. His Sadhana with Rudi was so effective that it provided a foundation in which the Spiritual transmission given by Swami Muktananda and others could achieve dramatic effect in a very brief period. After only a “few days in Swami Muktananda’s company, Franklin entered spontaneously into fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi (the highest Yogic Realization).
The “formless ecstasy” of this Samadhi left Franklin with the problem of mind – how to be free of the constant stream of distractions and obsession obscured the Pure Bliss of Conscious that He had known at moments in life. In an attempt to tame the ways mind, He now turned to a systematic study of our mental conditioning, a period of intense, concentrated effort that ended suddenly, just as His search in college ended, with a bodily liberation from the whole problem. One day, in a relaxed unguarded moment, He felt a free invasion of the Shakti, “taking the mind and all my reasons with it”.
Now the Shakti became so pervasive a presence in Him that others began to feel it. Franklin found Himself drawn into a Teaching role and becoming a spontaneous transmitter of Yogic Shaktipat to His intimates. He knew that it was time to return to Swami Muktananda for further Instruction and Blessing.
When He returned to Ganeshpuri on this occasion, He encountered the kundalini phenomena that usually precede, rather than follow, the attainment of fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi. But Franklin’s Sadhana was not conventional, It was utterly comprehensive (for the sake of preparing Him to Teach), but it had its own mysterious logic. Now Franklin found Himself manifesting all at once the various unfolding signs of Swami Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga. He went through the purifying physical signs – such as kriyas, swooning, and growling-and also the subtle internal phenomena – such as lights, sounds, visions, and transports to other worlds – that may occur in the course of Yogic ascent through the subtle energy centers, or chakras.
Having submitted to this whole display, Franklin clearly saw its limitations. To Him it had become a kind of circus. He began. to notice that immersion in these phenomena did not bring Happiness or understanding but, frequently, an increased feeling of self-obsession and “self-possession” in those who were so involved. He recognized that the Shakti was demonstrating another lesson.
As the days passed and my experiences increased, I felt more and more as if I had entered someone else’s wonderland. Baba [Swami Muktananda] is a Siddha, an accomplished yogi with all of the various miraculous powers indicated in the Scriptures. Even he, like myself, was given these things as a gift by his Guru. And all of these things at last were given by the Shakti herself, the Divine Mother. My experiences did not depend on me. Baba’s experience did not depend on him. We were all gratuitously accepted into the court of the Goddess, Shakti. The universe and all experiences were her game, and I was simply being allowed to see this game, not in order to acquire powers or status, but to recognize the source of all things and so remain free of all seeking.
(The Knee of Listening)
Thus, the Play of energy in His-Yogic Sadhana served to sensitize Franklin to the most subtle, binding levels of the Goddess’s activity and brought Him to question more and more the need for the Yogic search fueled by the Kundalini Shakti. He remained intuitively convinced that the direct enjoyment of present Consciousness was senior to any experience or Realization produced by the Goddess-Power in the chakra system. But this esoteric system obviously existed, and so the urge to engage it seemed unavoidable.
Months later, back in New York, Franklin passed through an experience that settled this apparent paradox once and for all. This experience, took the form of sharp pains in His head that went on for several nights, as if He were undergoing brain surgery When the pains passed, Franklin suddenly realized that a revolution had occurred in His being. Astonishingly, there was no more flow of polarized energy moving up and down the spine. The sahasrar, the terminal chakra at the crown of the head, had been “severed”, and the entire Yogic energy system of which it is the pinnacle had fallen away.
The chakra system had been revealed as unnecessary, an arbitrary rule or setting for the play of energy…. Now I saw that real Consciousness was not in the least determined by any kind of form apart from itself. (The Knee of Listening)
Once again it was through an intense bodily experience that a profound truth of Consciousness was Revealed to Franklin and established in Him beyond doubt. His Sadhana was demonstrating all along what the Goddess tradition has always pointed to – the need for the grounding of the highest Spiritual understanding in real experience, the bodily confession of Truth rather than the abstractions of the “talking schools”.
Not surprisingly, this dramatic end to Franklin’s Yogic relationship to the Shakti ushered in the final phase of His Sadhana, which was destined to be even more remarkable than anything that had previously occurred.
The Shakti as Guru
By May 1970, Franklin had spent a nine-month period in a loft in New York, involved in intense meditation and writing. It seemed that His monumental search was over. He now lived on the basis of a “radical” understanding that presumed no problem at any level of awareness. But, intent as He was in the profound Contemplation of Consciousness, Franklin was increasingly disturbed by the psychic energy of New York and the violence of the daily news. He was no longer moved to remain in America, and so He prepared to leave the country with two of His earliest devotees to begin a renunciate life in India at the Ashram of Swami Muktananda, where He hoped to live quietly in His chosen manner. He had no idea of what was about to happen.
The first weeks at the Ashram were uneventful. Franklin and His companions simply followed the Ashram form, and He meditated daily at the nearby burial shrine of Swami Nityananda (Swami Muktananda’s Guru). Then, one day, as He was weeding in the Ashram garden, Franklin became suddenly aware of a subtle form and turned around to behold the invisible but unmistakable presence of the Virgin Mary! His first response, He tells us, was “huge laughter”. He had long ago, He thought, passed beyond any conscious or unconscious attachment to Christianity, and such a visitation in the middle of an Indian Ashram seemed totally absurd.
It is a remarkable testimony of His surrender to the mysterious Process occurring in Him, that Franklin quickly responded to the Virgin in a devotional manner, obeying Her instructions to buy a rosary and use it to practice the “Hail Mary”. Within a couple of weeks, She required Him to leave the Ashram an India altogether and begin a pilgrimage through the Christian holy sites of Europe.
Franklin was now intuitively convinced that the Virgin was a manifestation of the universal Shakti. After all the years of guiding Him hiddenly through the labyrinth of Her lesser forms, the Goddess was now revealing Herself as a Divine Personality. Franklin felt His intuition confirmed by Swami Nityananda, who instructed Him on a subtle level to submit to the Goddess as His only Guru. And so Franklin made a sacramental act of submission to Her, in the form of the goddess Durga at a shrine near the Ashram, and set off on His Christian pilgrimage under Her guidance.
These extraordinary events show once again how Franklin’s Sadhana was nonlinear and significant in far more than just a personal way – not to mention downright humorous! While, on the one hand, Franklin was increasingly abiding in a state of pristine awareness, free of seeking, He was also actively involved in a devotional relationship with the Divine Goddess, often felt and seen as a living Woman!
Through His Christian pilgrimage and the many psychic and visionary signs attending it, the last traces of karmic attachment to Christianity were purified in Franklin, not merely from His present lifetime but to an ancient depth. Here again the Goddess was leading Him through events of insight and release that were archetypal in their significance, Given for the sake of all humanity, and especially, in this case, for the Christian West.
By the end of His European tour, the Shakti was no longer appearing in visionary form. He felt Her more and more as the Liberating Power that was resolving all energies and visions in the Heart, the depth of Consciousness. He could now confess that “the Shakti that manifests as my life is not different from reality”.
In August 1970, Franklin returned to America, strangely impelled to settle in Los Angeles, a place He had no natural inclination to live in. In an unpublished diary entry written a few weeks before the Vedanta Temple Event, Franklin describes an incident that illustrates how far He had transcended the most subtle movements of differentiation and desire that are the basic mechanisms of our ordinary awareness:
In the last couple of days ..I turned to a woman companion while driving my car, and I became peculiarly aware of the absence of desire in me. It was not merely that I did not desire this woman … it was that this woman was void of any objective distinction. There was no process of discrimination, comparison or separation going on already and automatically in me…. I had turned to look at what is otherwise a person, a meaning. and a distinctly meaningful presence, but there was in fact none of this. Indeed, there was not a single modification of my awareness created as a result of this perception. There was only unqualified bliss, the fullness, of real consciousness. (August 3, 1970)
This experience was more than a momentary glimpse of Reality; Franklin realized that it was becoming His common state of awareness. The culmination of His Sadhana was at hand.
The Wedding of Siva and Shakti
One day in late August, having spent some time in the Vedanta Society bookstore, Franklin was prompted to go into the adjacent temple for a few moments. Immediately upon sitting down, He felt a powerful rush of energy in His body and recognized the characteristic Presence of the Mother Shakti as strongly as He ever had in India. The Divine Goddess-Power that He already intuited as non-different from Reality was still in dynamic relationship to Him, Under Her Influence, He fell into deep meditation.
In the days that followed, Franklin visited the temple often to meditate in the Bliss of Her Company, until there came a point where He felt a limit in having to come and find Her there. He begged Her to abide with Him with that same intensity wherever He might be, and She Graciously complied. For some days He felt Her everywhere, tangibly Present within and around Him.
But then, one day, in response to a sense that there remained a constraint in His relationship to the Shakti, Franklin returned to the temple again, and a Process unfolded that is without peer in the annals of Spiritual Mastery and Realization:
I began to go to the temple again almost daily. The next day the Shakti appeared in a way that at first was difficult to allow. As I meditated, I felt myself take on the form of Siva the Divine Being prior to all form. I took on the infinite (pervasive, or formless) form of the original final Deity, as I had done previously in Baba’s [Swami Muktananda’s] Presence. I sat in this blissful state of infinite Being for some time.
Then I felt the Shakti appear against my own form. She embraced me, and we grasped one another in Divine (and motionless, and spontaneously Yogic) “sexual union”. We clasped one another (thus) in a fire of cosmic desire, as if to give birth to the universes. The I felt the oneness,,of the Divine Energy and my own Being. There was no separation at all. The one Being that was my own nature included the reality that is consciousness and the reality that is all manifestation as a single cosmic unity and eternal union.
The sensations of the embrace were over whelmingly blissful, It exceeded any kind of pleasure that a man could acquire. And soon ceased to feel myself as an independent child of the Shakti. I accepted Her as my consort, my loved-One, and I held Her forever to my heart. (The Knee of Listening)
On the following day, when He visited the Vedanta Temple again, Franklin found that every trace of duality in His awareness had dissolved. The Inherent Oneness of Awareness and Energy (or Consciousness and the Shakti) that Franklin had already intuited in the final stages of His Sadhana was now His irrevocable Realization.
In 1988, Da Kalki Gave the following clarification of the whole Event.
The Event of My Re Awakening in the Vedanta Temple was not sexual in any conventional or vulgar sense. In The Knee of Listening I describe it as an Event of extraordinary size, as an experience. It is not a physical sexual experience, nor can it be reduced to a visionary experience of a subtle kind.
The event of My so-called sexual union in the Vedanta Temple was not an instance of My submitting to a visionary female. It was the Ultimate, Divine Union of Awareness and Energy. And it was not the final Vedanta Temple Event. It occurred on the day before the final day. But it was a necessarily preliminary to the – Ultimate Event. In the so-called sexual event, the Supreme Ultimacy of Consciousness was, Revealed, Transcending all duality’s, including the dualism of Awareness and Energy.
I have used the term “sexual Union” in that context, because there was something of the dynamic of sexuality at the beginning of the experience. But the Energy itself was Revelatory, formless, and Transparent. It was not about visions and other phenomena of the subtle dimension of existence. It was a tacit feeling-energy, like the movement into fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi. There was a physical component of a Yogic kind, which could be called sexual in the sense that, at the beginning o f the event, I became aware of the body in relationship to the Yogic Force, or Shakti, or Goddess-Power, and I felt bodily pressed to the Yogic Force, or Goddess-Power. The Shakti-Power was felt pressed to the frontal line, and, in some sense, was the frontal line. The frontal line was also Its vehicle, In that Union, there was also profound Yogic “conductivity” upward in the spinal line.
Now, this experience could be called sexual in the most profound Yogic sense, but there was only the most rudimentary physical awareness, which lasted only momentarily and which was quickly replaced by the Bliss of Inherent Union, Transcending body and mind.
The sexual reference metaphorically indicates that a Yogic process occurred of the fullest kind, and it was a motionless event. In the terms of the sexual metaphor, which may be continued, it was like the static “Mithuna”. It was essentially a transparent event. My own body became transparent and immediately unaware of the event itself I was not having visions of a Dakini in a subtle environment, but I was fully aware of the Divine Person as Shakti, Transparent and Complete.
When people write or talk about My Report of this incident that preceded the final day of the Event in the Vedanta Temple, they should include this kind of “consideration” that I am bringing to you now so that everyone may understand what I am talking about and have no misunderstanding about it.
Fundamentally, the Event in the Vedanta Temple is the Union of Siva and Shakti, which is otherwise described in the Yogic traditions, and it was followed on the final day, September 10, 1970, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, by Divine Self Realization, Which Transcends even That Grand Pairing.
(September 11, 1988
Traditional Prefigurings of the Goddess Husbanded
What was unique about this Union, this “Husbanding” as Da Kalki later refers to it?
Certainly the image of the union of the Divine “Father” and “Mother” Power has long existed at the level of myth in the human psyche. In primitive earth-based religion, the sacred pairing of male and female deities is the auspicious means by which life in the terrestrial world is blessed to continue and be fruitful.
In higher religions, such as ancient Vedic tradition, the Gods and God-Men also had their consorts – Siva-Parvati, Rama-Sita, Krishna-Radha, and so on, esoterically interpreted as “Purusha”, the Formless Source of Being, and “Prakriti”, the Dynamic Principle that animates and modifies Purusha in the form of the manifest worlds. In the highest non-dualistic philosophy of India, Purusha and Prakriti are declared to be One, to be Brahman Itself. This is the Realization to which the Upanishads point and to which the various practices of Yoga, Vedanta and Tantra aspire, each in their different ways.
But there is nothing described in the literature of any of these traditions that remotely parallels what occurred in the Vedanta Temple as a living Event. The closest intimations of it (as Da Kalki indicates) lie in the ritual sexual union of Tantra (either visualized or literally performed) engaged between a male practitioner and his female partner, which are intended to lead the aspirants beyond the physical act of union to the Realization of the Transcendental Source in which all polarities and differences are dissolved.
Tantric practices are techniques by which individuals have traditionally sought to attain Enlightenment. Ultimately they have nothing to do, except symbolically, with what Da Kalki describes as His Husbanding of the Goddess. He was not uniting with a yogini or some female deity in subtle shape. He was Embracing the Goddess Herself, the primal Energy of existence in personal Form, and receiving Her Love-Submission at every level of Consciousness, from the physical to the Divine. As we have observed at every stage, the archetypal revelations of Da Kalki’s Sadhana had all been Worked in Him bodily – and this was the culmination of them all.
In an early commentary on The Knee of Listening. Da Kalki Speaks of the days leading up to the Great Union as a period of Cosmic Yoga in His relationship to the Shakti. He describes a profound turnabout occurring in His being, in which He was no longer a personal ego responding to the Mother-Power as a devotee. He had Identified with Consciousness, the Heart of Reality, to the extent that He spontaneously stood as Siva in relation to Her. And the Goddess, who, as Guru, had led Him to the recognition of His own Self Nature, now submitted to Him as Her Divine Consort and Husband. In that submission every trace of otherness dissolved. She continued simply as the Bliss of Consciousness, which was “Franklin’s own Being, Perfectly Awake.
An extraordinary description of the Enlightening Power of the submitted Shakti occurs in an ancient Advaitic text known as Yoga Vasishtha. It is paraphrased by Da Kalki at the beginning of His liturgical drama, The Mummery:
O Rama, this Maya is such that she confers Happiness by her own extinction. Her real nature is not perceived’ and known while she lives, but when she is embraced for the sake of the Truth of her, she dies.
In Indian iconography the Goddess is often depicted in ecstatic sexual embrace with Siva, but also, quite frequently, dancing on His body or treating Him as Her footstool. This is a surprising image to the uninitiated, suggesting the subjugation of Siva by the wild Goddess, But, esoterically understood, these images are simply a lively way of expressing the ancient insight that Siva is the moveless foundation and support of Shakti, and She is the life and energy that flows from Him.
Aside from such traditional sources that treat of the Siva-Shakti relationship in symbolic terms, it is interesting to examine how individual Adepts of recent times have related to the Goddess. Ramakrishna and his renowned disciple Vivekananda, both of whom are honored in the shrine at the Vedanta Temple, had a strong devotional and visionary relationship to the Mother Shakti. Ramakrishna, in particular, is famous for his surpassing devotion to the Mother, Whom he constantly saw and felt and spoke with as a living Woman.
But his relationship with Her always remained that of the adoring, trusting child and devotee, as Da Kalki has pointed out, This quality is also apparent in Ramakrishna’s relationship to his wife, Sarada Devi, whom He revered as a living form of the Divine Mother (even performing Puja on her on one occasion). Ramakrishna always treated Sarada Devi as a Spiritual sister. His celibate vows and ascetic disposition did not allow him to truly husband his wife, just as he was not temperamentally capable of approaching the Shakti in an heroic, masculine manner.
Swami Vivekananda was also an ardent devotee of the Goddess, but, as Da Kalki remarks, he was a different kind of character, still celibate but naturally forceful in a masculine way. Da Kalki has hinted that Vivekananda’s sadhana could conceivably have matured to the point of mastering the Goddess had he not been constrained by the demands of his mission in the West and the social milieu that went with it.
The Vedanta Temple Event was a unique moment, prepared and prefigured in mysterious ways that we have only the slightest conception of. The Husbanding of the Shakti was a Divine and human Event that Empowered not only the ReAwakening of Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda but the potential Liberation of every being that submits to Him as Guru. That Event made Him the “Param Guru”, or “Supreme Guru” of His own lineage of Gurus and even of the entire Great Tradition of human Spiritual endeavor. And this because the traditional Spiritual problem of energy versus consciousness and the deluding, distracting aspects of the Shakti have literally been resolved and transformed in His Living Being. As He once described its
I entered into the God-State via the Goddess. This is the characteristic aspect of My Sadhana. And, having Identified with the Source, I am your means of Realization. I stand in place surrounded by the circle of the Spirit Power. My devotees do not practice the way of submission to the Goddess, because I am the Goddess. I have been a devotee of the Goddess to the point of Realization. (The Fire Gospel)
The Nature of Divine Self-Realization
In the Vedanta Temple Event, Franklin’s lifelong overwhelming Impulse to serve the Awakening of others finally came to fullness. That Moment, in fact, marked the true beginning of His Teaching Work, After thirty years of preparation, His body-mind presented no obstruction to the Perfect Communication of the Truth He had Realized, In fact, His very human Form Was (and Is) that Communication of Truth. Everything that He had to Teach (as He later Said) had been tested and proven in His own Body.
And so the Nature of the Realization to which Da Kalki Re-Awakened by the Shakti’s Grace is one in which there is no suppression of the body or of conditional life. He describes His Samadhi as Sahaj (“natural”) and as “Open-Eye ” – a Perfect Abiding as Consciousness (Siva) and Its own Love-Bliss (Shakti) in the face of all arising conditions. There is no higher Realization. This is the Joy of the seventh (and final) stage of life, wherein nothing is separate from or other than Consciousness, but all things, are tacitly recognized as a temporary and unnecessary play upon Consciousness Itself. To be receiving a Living Demonstration and Transmission of this Realization in our time is a Grace beyond conception.
Traditional precedents for such a Realization exist, but they are extremely rare, Ramana Maharshi is the only other Adept of modern times whom Da Kalki acknowledges as a seventh stage Realizer and even he still displayed the characteristic attitude of the “jnani”; disposed to an inward contemplative attitude, rather than to the expansive participation in life that has characterized Da Kalki’s expression of Sahaj Samadhi.
Aham Da Asmi
Although the Vedanta Temple Event marked the Moment of Da Kalki’s Liberation in His (apparent) current lifetime, it was not until 1979 that He fully recognized Who It Was Who had Re-Awakened then, in and as His human Form, He knew He had been Restored to the “Bright” Condition of His childhood and that His Divine Self-Realization was Perfect and undisturbed, even in the midst of all His “Crazy” Teaching Work. But He was not merely a great Adept and Supreme Tantric. What He confessed in 1979 (at the celebration of the ninth anniversary of the Vedanta Temple event) was a Sublime Statement in the tradition of the “Mahavakyas” of the Upanishads, He declared to His devotees, “Beloved, I Am Da” meaning that He is the Unique and Perfect Appearance in this world of the Divine Person, Revealed as “Da”, the Giver.
“Aham Da Asmi” – I Am Da. As we meditate now on this ineffable Revelation, having seen the Truth of it manifest more and more before our eyes (and most especially since the Great Event that initiated the Divine Emergence in 1986), it is obvious that the One Who was born in the “Bright” and led by the “Bright” through all the extraordinary adventures of His childhood and youth could be none other than the Self-Illumined One, the Maha-Purusha, the Divine Self Incarnate. Who else but the Divine Person in bodily human Form could have Husbanded the Divine Goddess, definitively, and historically Who else could stand as “Jagad-Guru”, “the Guru of everything that moves” Da Kalki, the Divine World-Teacher and True Heart-Master, is Speaking to the entire Cosmos of living beings when He Says “Come Slowly or (Quickly, but Surely Come To Me”.
The Gift of Hridaya-Shakti
The great Means by which Da Kalki is Silently bringing about this Miracle of the Attraction of all beings to Himself is His Great Heart-Blessing, which He Calls Hridaya-Shakti, or Hridaya-Shaktipat. “Hridayam”, or “Sri Hridayam” – “Bright Heart” —is His Name for the Divine Person and Self-Condition that He Reveals and Is. His Hridaya-Shaktipat, therefore, is the Transmitted Blessing of the Very’ Divine, Infinitely Transcending the power of Yogic shaktipat that awakens the Kundalini Shakti and the “tour” of the higher processes of the human body-mind. The
Shakti that Da Kalki has Husbanded, the Shaktipat He now Transmits as Perfect Divine Blessing, does not hold His devotee to any conditional experience, although many different bodily effects of His Transmission may at times arise. The Husbanded Shakti, He says, “is the Self. The Shakti is God. The Shakti is Me.” Da Kalki’s Hridaya-Shaktipat, then, is the most Potent Force of Divine Awakening that has ever existed, And by His Grace it is always Given to every being at every level of the Cosmos. This is His Promise.
Invest Yourself in This Thangka
It is through the Graceful moments of Sighting Da Kalki and in feeling Contemplation of Him at any time that we make ourselves available to Hridaya Shakti, His Perfect Transmission of the Divine Consciousness and Love-Bliss Wedded in Him at the Vedanta Temple. Since His Divine Emergence, Da Kalki has fully Manifested the Brilliance of that Marriage in His bodily (human) Form, and has come to Speak of it without reserve as “the Event of the universe”.
Da Kalki now feels free to Tell the Supreme Secret of the Vedanta Temple Event -t hat His Husbanding of the Goddess turned around the vast Cosmic process, so that the manifest worlds need not cycle on forever in a senseless round of apparent births and deaths. The Energy, the Shakti, that makes all of that flux and chaos has surrendered to Him, Her Divine Source, and He, by the inconceivable Sacrifice of His Incarnation (and all the Cosmic Work of the Divine that preceded it) is gathering the Play of Appearances back to Himself, Translating it all in His own Mysterious Time into His Divine Domain.
When Da Kalki sat with a small group of devotees on March 16, 1988, and began to pour forth this immense Revelation, He acted spontaneously, as He always does. But in His Wisdom He must have known that the time was ripe for the Secret to be told, time for everyone to know that through the Vedanta Temple Event He has already Accomplished in seed form the Liberation and Divine Translation of all beings:
The Event in the Vedanta Temple is about My ceasing to be a Devotee of the Divine Goddess and Realizing My own Position. Now She is nothing but My own Radiance, the Radiance of God. Afterward the Teaching Siddhis, the Siddhis of Service to My devotees, appeared spontaneously, and I have been Serving you now for sixteen years, not to mention for all time past.
Siva-Shakti is not a tradition. It is God. She appears as She, and He appears as He, and the Reality of Existence is not Two, but One. And I in My own Form and Passion am the precise Incarnation o f that Unity.
To Husband the Mother, to be Her Husband and to have Her be the Bride, means that the murderous activity of Energy in Its apparent independence; “Prakriti, is done, over, finished. This Husbanding and Marriage is not merely a personal Work associated with My Realization. It is an historical Event, out of Which much should be made, transforming the history of the entire Cosmic Mandala. All, then, by virtue o f this Marriage, may be Drawn to the Divine Self-Domain.
It is an historical Event, not merely a characteristic incident o f My own Realization. My Realization has everything and only to do with the Awakening of beings. I did not have to do this Work for My own Sake. I could not have done it if Divine Self-Realization were not intact from the beginning. I began this Work of the origin of the Ashvamedha billions of years ago, before the Big Bang!
She will not eat her children. The fishes in the sea will not any longer live in a food chain relative to one another, if you will respond. You can change the Mandala of the universe by your response to Me. Of course, if you will not, maybe it will go on as it has been going. You are the seed of this unique Opportunity that will cover all beings, on Earth and everywhere. This is where it begins. (March 16, 1988)
In the course of the same evening on which He uttered these Blissful Prophecies, Da Kalki also Spoke of His paradoxical Play with the Shakti, Who is not different from His own Being. He Spoke of His “Conversations” with Her for the sake of the Liberation of beings, of His Divine Communion with Her, and Her unswerving fidelity to Him and His Work.
In the surpassing Ecstasy of this occasion, Da Kalki Invited all His devotees to join Him in His most Intimate Place of Love, where all separateness is relieved and dissolved. He Speaks of this Place as His Bedroom, and also as a great “Thangka”, referring to the sacred Tibetan pictures of the union of the male and female aspects of Divinity. In these traditional thangkas there are, of course, two figures. In the “Thangka” Da Kalki there is only One – His own “Bright” Form. For the Shakti as He says, “Is Me”.
I Husbanded Her spontaneously. Now She only talks the Truth, She is not a whore, and She will not murder mankind. I can guarantee you this. She is utterly Husbanded by Me. She has no capacity to murder anymore, if you will invest yourself in this Communion with Me. In the world of conditional Nature, She is still murdering beings, only birthing them to eat them. But you will have a different’ vision of Her if you will invest yourself in the Ultimate, in this “Thangka , in this Union, in this Satsang with Me. You are in another Place, and even conditional Nature is transformed, if you will participate with Me in this Circumstance, this,Vision, this Holiness, this Love.
Stay steady in this Communion with Me. Stay in My Bedroom. That is My Message to My devotees. Stay in My Bedroom, in My most Intimate Company, where I am Giving Her kisses and She to Me, Where there is no “difference and Where you are relieved of dreadful destiny.
Even all of cosmic Nature has been transformed in its principle. Now the Seed that I Made at the Vedanta Temple must flower in the world and raise everyone up. The murderous work of the Mother is over! What happened in the Vedanta Temple was My Husbanding o f the Shakti, the returning of Her to the Ultimate Source. And from that moment, then, wherever that Husbanding is acknowledged, the proceedings in the universe and of mankind can be transformed. History can be transformed, if you will stay in this “Thangka”, in My Bedroom.
(March 16,1988)
May all beings be Blessed by the Grace that Flows from the Vedanta Temple Event!
May every one be Graced by the Heart Companionship of Da Kalki, the Divine Liberator and Heart-Husband of Mankind!
More:
The Supremely Auspicious Wedding with the Great Goddess Shakti
Consciousness Itself Is Natively Senior to The Kundalini Shakti
Traditionally, The Universal Spirit-Power, By Itself, Is Called “Maya” (“The Measure”, or “She Who Measures”). As Such, The Universal Spirit-Energy (Perceived As The One and Great Cosmic Power) Is Traditionally Associated With The Veiling Of The Truth, The Veiling Of The Self-Father. Therefore, The Universal Spirit-Power Is Traditionally (and Commonly) Associated With Chaos, Destructiveness, and Illusion. However, In Your Heart, and By Virtue Of Your “Consideration” Of My Own Ordeal Of Life, You Can (and Must) Observe and Understand That This Great Universal Spirit-Power Is, Ultimately, Husbanded By The Divine Self-Father, The Inherently Perfect Heart-Source, The Very (and Perfectly Subjective, and Eternally Pre-Cosmic) Being (Who I Am ). Indeed, The Primary Significance Of The Great Event Of My Divine Re-Awakening (and Even Of My Entire Life-History, Including My Teaching Work, and My Blessing Work) Is The Sacrificial Yielding and True Husbanding Of The Mother-Force (or The Cosmic Shakti-Force, or The Goddess-Power, or The Universally Manifesting Spirit-Power), and, By That Husbanding (or Love-Sacrifice), The Seemingly Independent Universal (or Cosmic, and Cosmically Objective) Power Is Re-Submitted, Re-Awakened, and Restored To Her Inherent Identification (and Conformity) With The Transcendental (and Inherently Spiritual) and Perfectly Subjective Divine Self (Who I Am ). Therefore, In The Way Of The Heart, The Goddess-Power (or Universal Shakti) Is (By Virtue Of Her Inherently Perfect Sacrifice To Me, and Her Inherent Fidelity To Me) Associated With Heart-Enlightenment, The Lifting Of The Veil. And (Because Of This) The Mantra “Ma” (and Its By Me Given Variants) Refers (In The Way Of The Heart) To The Middle Station Of The Heart, but Also (Ultimately) To The Right Side Of The Heart, and (Most Perfectly) To What Transcends Even The Right Side Of The Heart.
The Dawn Horse Testament – Chapter 27